Learning These Notes Will Help You Play Any Song on the Piano

The piano is an excellent musical instrument to learn; it gives you a thorough look at the world of both technical and expressive music. And it all starts with learning the notes the keys and what you can play with them.

Melodyful Staff

Last Updated: Dec 18, 2017

A piano is a very wonderful instrument, the music of which floats through the atmosphere, enchanting every quantum of universe through which it passes. Legendary composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Chopin made very famous compositions using the piano.

The music made on the piano is conventionally scripted in the form of staff notations on the music sheet. Hence, familiarizing yourself with the piano notes and the staff music notations is an extremely important task.

It's always a subjective matter of finding one instrument easier to comprehend than another, but for many, the piano helps make learning theory very easy. Playing a scale is simplified once you know where the notes are, which is also easy to figure out. In this article, we tell you about the different notes that you need to know in order to play the piano and give you some tips that will help you play the instrument.

Getting to Know the Piano Notes

A grand piano has 88 keys. Of those, 52 are white and 36 are black. Each key represents a particular note, whose pitch is not replicated anywhere else on the piano. You have the seven natural notes in music: C, D, E, F, A, B, all of which fall on the white keys. The sharp (or flat) notes, A#, C#, D#, F#, and G#, fall on the black keys. Since B and E don't have sharps, you get the black keys in groups of two and three, with two successive white keys in between.

The white key to the left of the group of two black keys is always C. The key that represents C in the middle of the piano is called the 'Middle C'. It represents the center of the grand staff, which is the C note that divides the bass clef and the treble clef.

Piano Notes in Scales

In your beginner's technical training, you'll come across scales. To play the scales on the piano is quite easy, once you know which scale has accidentals. Let's take the first, and the easiest example, of the C major scale. The scale is made of all natural notes, no accidentals. The scale goes C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and the higher C. To play the scale in an ascending order, all you have to do is to locate the starting note C, and play all the white notes from it.

Taking another scale, G major, we come across a sharp F here. F# will be the black key that comes right after the white F key. So the scale G, A, B, C, D, E, F# will be played with all the notes from G to E on the white keys, and then you play the black F#, skipping the F. Similarly, all the other scales will respectively employ white keys for naturals and black keys for accidentals.

Choosing a Pattern to Learn the Piano

It should be noted that a lot of practice and theory comes into play for the piano on an intermediate level. You can choose to learn theoretically, making the intermediate level theory easier, and put more emphasis on practice at that point. Or you could do it the other way round, putting sheer practice ahead of learning theory. A decent part of your beginner's course will always be focused on songs and how to play them note-by-note. So pick your stronger suit and learn ahead.

Playing a Song by Figuring Out the Scale

You won't always find an existing or accurate set of notes for all the songs you want to learn. In such cases, you'll have to go by ear. To do this, you'll first need an idea of relative pitch. Relative pitch is when you establish one note and base the others around that note. You end up transcribing the music by yourself. This is way tougher than it sounds, but you end up learning so much in the process.

Once you've established one note in the song, try to play a couple of notes around it and see which ones fall into the song's pattern. Then you have to sit down with your theory material and try to fit the notes into a relevant scale. After that, it's just a matter of applying the key to the song and playing it on your own.

Another easier but slightly less accurate method to do this is to look at the first and the last note (or chord) of the song. Almost all songs start and end on the same note, because it sounds more complete that way. And that note helps identify the key, which is usually that note itself. Thanks to the Internet, finding the sheet music or the right kind of theory book has become too easy. What's difficult is analyzing it right. If you can manage to do that, then you'll be a great pianist.